“You have focused on what Ukraine is giving up. What concessions will [Vladimir] Putin be asked to make?” a reporter asked Hegseth at NATO headquarters in Brussels.
“President Putin responds to strength,” Hegseth added.
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 13, 2025
But that interpretation of events flies in the face of what the president’s former allies see in his negotiations with Putin. Speaking with CNN on Wednesday, Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton claimed that Putin’s insistence on negotiating through Trump—rather than going through previous administrations or through Ukraine’s leaders directly—was simply because Putin believes “he’ll get more out of it.”
NATO allies were left reeling Wednesday after Hegseth pitched that America would effectively end its role as the steward of European security, revealing that the administration’s peace talks with Russia had taken several chips “off the table,” including Ukraine’s possible NATO membership (something the military alliance had promised in 2008), the possibility of a U.S. presence in Ukraine to enforce postwar security guarantees, and the end of NATO missions to Ukraine.
The new deal, per Bolton, amounted to Russian propaganda and was practically “written in the Kremlin.”
“What he decides to allow or not allow is at the purview of the leader of the free world, of President Trump,” Hegseth said Thursday. “I’m not going to stand at this podium and declare what President Trump will do or won’t do.”
“Hegseth’s lack of experience is already showing,” posted The Economist’s defense editor, Shashank Joshi, on X. “Publicly makes a series of pre-emptive concessions prior to the most important negotiations in many years, and then has to publicly explain that he had no authority to say any of those things.”
“This was a huge fuckup by Hegseth,” Vietor wrote. “There’s no walking back his initial comments that Ukraine won’t join NATO or gain back all the territory lost since 2014. He wrote Putin a big check that has already been cashed. Maybe don’t make an unqualified Fox News host @SecDef?”
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